Sierra Club headed into another rocky election: Key environmental group riven over bike trails

SANTA CRUZ — A year after an unprecedented campaign to shake up the leadership of the county's largest environmental group, advocates for expanding bicycling in area parks have formed a second slate of candidates to challenge Sierra Club incumbents bent on protecting habitat.

Since last December, when pro-bike candidates won three open seats on its executive committee, the club's Santa Cruz County group has been in turmoil over the future of the 3,300-member organization riven by discord over new trails through Arana Gulch and Pogonip. A third of the board members resigned during the past year due to the infighting.

Old-guard environmentalists, suspicious of government projects and concerned about water conservation and native plant preservation, are butting heads with an evolving brand of green activist — one who isn't opposed to development and hopes to slow climate change through transportation initiatives.

Some conservationists see trail biking as destructive to habitat and dangerous to hikers. Cyclists, meanwhile, are looking to improve access across town and between regional trails as a means for reducing vehicle trips.

Fresh from a November showdown before the state Coastal Commission — where club members openly disagreed over a paved trail system the commission approved for Arana Gulch — the tension is even higher now. Another cycling slate has emerged to take on the club chairman and two other leaders in mail-in balloting that closes Jan. 11.

WHY IT MATTERS

The outcome of the election is critical ahead of this spring's debate over the city's plans to add another multiuse trail to Pogonip, whose 640 acres of mostly wildland constitute the city's largest park. The city's Parks and Recreation Commission is expected to consider the project in early February — with the City Council taking it up shortly thereafter — and the opinions of Sierra Club members will be a key part of public testimony.

The composition of the club's nine-member board will also set the tone for how the organization positions itself over the federally mandated protection of fish habitat in the San Lorenzo River and North Coast streams, as well as a related battle over a proposed seawater desalination plant designed to offset such reductions in water supply. Both issues will be hotly debated in 2012.

As the city awaits an environmental impact analysis on desalination and continues negotiations with fisheries agencies, club leaders of all stripes have agreed to take a wait-and-see approach with the proposed plant. For now, biking is the divisive issue.

"If this new slate wins, it means the bicycle single-issue group will have control over the Sierra Club — that will be the outcome," said chairman Kevin Collins, who opposes the multiuse trail projects in Arana Gulch and Pogonip.

"It will lose a number of core conservation advocates," he continued. "Everyone understands that bicycles are healthy and don't use gasoline, but bicycle issues are not a major issue for the Sierra Club."

Challengers see incumbents as close-minded and top-down.

"I talked with a number of people who had felt frustrated with the Sierra Club for a while," said challenger Tawn Kennedy, who joined the club last year and hopes to engage younger citizens. "Their basic complaint was that (the executive committee) pushed away the general membership."

POLITICKING

Kennedy, who directs the Santa Cruz bicycle nonprofit Green Ways to Schools, said he isn't convinced a new multiuse trail through Pogonip is the best idea with plans for the county's long-awaited rail trail now in the works. But he is joined by solar engineer Greg McPheeters and organic farming advocate Mary Odegaard on a slate strongly backed by the bicycling advocacy group People Power.

McPheeters said he decided to run after Collins, the club chairman, insinuated during public comments at an earlier Coastal Commission meeting that some people who might identify themselves as Sierra Club members when speaking about the Arana Gulch issue were not active in the group's environmental work.

"I have a fundamentally different view of the Sierra Club membership and how to engage that membership to further the group's mission to explore, enjoy and protect the planet," McPheeters wrote in an email. "When a leader starts publicly disparaging his members in general in public, that's something that is weakening the club rather than making it more effective, and that more than anything is what made my decision to run at this time."

Collins, a 15-year Sierra Club volunteer, said the three challengers have, until now, not offered to take leadership roles in conservation efforts within the club and are seeking primarily to promote bike access. He is running alongside club treasurer Mark Sullivan and forestry committee chairman Dennis Davie.

The opposing slates are featured in competing mailers that have been sent to club members, who vote by returning ballots published on the back of a monthly newsletter.

It was a controversial mailer that started the war within the club last year.

The first pro-bike slate put out a surprise mailer in December 2010, believed to be the first ever for the local election. It trumpeted endorsements from a host of political heavyweights, and an array of cycling groups and businesses simultaneously joined the club.

Incumbents called it a "hostile takeover."

Determined not to be out-maneuvered again, incumbents ramped up the campaign this year by paying for their own mailer. Members of this year's pro-bike slate said supporters paid for their mailer, but they didn't know exactly who.

Disgusted with the politicking, Kristen Raugust of Davenport quit the executive committee early last year after the first pro-bike slate's win.

"I knew I wouldn't be able to work with quasi-environmentalists who are connected to people within local government and whose purpose is to achieve their political objectives," Raugust said. "I resented that and resigned."

Raugust's replacement on the board also eventually quit, as did a pro-bike candidate elected last year.

Dannettee Shoemaker, director of the city's Parks and Recreation Department, said she hopes the division within the club doesn't impact the debate over the Pogonip project. The city has proposed adding a trail for cyclists, pedestrians and equestrians through the heart of the park to increase accessibility and reduce heroin dealing and illegal camping.

"If we had an organization like the Sierra Club support it, it couldn't hurt," she said. "If they didn't support it, would it kill the project? I hope not."